The PM uses the PC smokescreen

Howard is challenging symbolic and linguistic representations in a deeply ideological way.

"Politically correct" is a famously rubbery putdown. What I see as fairness or tolerance, you might see as hopelessly PC. Feminism, for example, challenges gender inequities to seek justice for women. But affirmative action? Hey, that's so PC.

The PC debate first flowered in America in the mid-1980s. It was a reaction against people, mainly academics, who saw a political dimension to seemingly neutral language and sought to challenge orthodoxies. "Politically correct" became shorthand for a humourless ideologue. Extreme, silly examples (such as substituting "womyn" for "women") were seen to typify an insidious plague stifling free speech.

PC can be defined in many ways. My dictionary blandly describes it as "marked by language or conduct that deliberately avoids giving offence, for example, on the basis of ethnic origin or sexual orientation".

A more charged definition comes from the Renaissance historian Professor Lisa Jardine in The War of the Words. PC, she says, "is a convenient bogeyman for those who fear that the diversification of our community and the cultures it produces will end up dislodging them from their own position as typical of (and therefore able to speak out on behalf of) the nation".

The idea of PC has really stuck around. It's the subject of many books. People study it at universities. Many still talk of it as a po-faced force permeating our world. As Don Watson notes in Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language, the frustrations felt by the politically powerless have been channelled towards the "politically correct".

This week, Prime Minister John Howard suggested more people were sending their kids to private schools as a reaction against an overly PC state system. "Some schools think you offend people by having nativity plays," he said. "I think that it's a reflection of the extent to which political correctness overtook this country, particularly through the teaching unions."

His PC talk also privileges Christianity over "values-neutral" schools. (Is this doublespeak for values that differ from his own?)

Howard used the magic PC words to try to position himself as somehow above politics. Here, PC is a smokescreen allowing him to attack unions and distract from his Government's user-pays ideology, exemplified by its plan to give more money to private schools.

His PC talk also privileges Christianity over "values-neutral" schools. (Is this doublespeak for values that differ from his own?) In a secular society, this is alarming stuff.

In fact, Howard and his supporters are challenging symbolic and linguistic representations in a deeply ideological (and humourless) way. You might call it the new PC.

At the National Museum of Australia, there's an outdoor area called the Garden of Australian Dreams. Bright blue poles rise from the garden's grounds, towering above the heads of visitors. This witty sculpture, created by landscape architect Professor Richard Weller, invokes memories of the original Blue Poles No. II by Jackson Pollock.

The Whitlam Government bought the then controversial painting in 1973 for $1.3 million. It's now reportedly worth more than $40 million. Professor Weller has described his sculpture as "a joke on money and culture and recent Australian history".

But the sculpture offends David Barnett, the Prime Minister's authorised biographer and a member of the museum's governing council. He objected to the blue telegraph poles because they would "constitute a monument to Gough Whitlam". Barnett raised the matter in a submission to an inquiry into the museum's exhibitions and public programs. "I was told the poles would be painted another colour," he wrote. "They are blue."

It's incredible to think that an abstract sculpture could attract this kind of scrutiny. What is art, if not an individual act of self-expression? And doesn't liberalism prize the rights of the individual?

Barnett described the museum as largely a collection of trivia mixed with Aboriginal advocacy (the word "genocide", for example, was written in Braille on discs on the building's aluminium cladding). He bemoaned a lack of input from specialist academics and the influence of postmodernism's "moral relativism". Earlier, he had warned that political correctness infected the labels explaining the museum's exhibits.

By couching his criticisms in terms of PC, Barnett implicitly casts his own voice as impartial. Yet the Government has subjected the museum to highly politicised scrutiny, amid a bigger struggle over the national story often described as the "history wars".

The social theorists often disparaged as politically correct recognise the power of language and symbols to construct our world, as well as reflect it. Words shape our perceptions of people and things.

This Government is also acutely aware of the way language can constitute the things it describes. What is the label "illegals" if not an attempt to reshape perceptions of asylum seekers who have broken no Australian law? And what is talk of "elites", if not a ploy to disparage educated people who may have an alternative point of view?